Category Archives: Mīmāṃsā

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What is the target of Kumārila’s atheist arguments?

Kumārila’s attacks certainly target the belief in supernatural beings who should be able to grant boons to human beings (the devatās), insofar as they show that this belief is inherently self-contradictory. For instance, these deities should be the actual recipients of ritual offerings. However, how could they receive offerings at the same time from different sacrificers in different places?

Kumārila also targets the belief in a Lord akin to the one defended by rational theology, both in Europe and in South Asia, again because this leads to contradictions. Kumārila explains that there is no need of such a Lord in order to explain the creation of the world, since there is no need to adduce further evidence in order to justify the world as it is now (i.e., existing), whereas one would need to adduce a strong external evidence to justify everything contradicting the world as we know it. Therefore, the continuous presence of the world becomes the default status and the theist has the burden of the proof and needs to be able to establish independently of his religious belief that there has been a time when the world did not exist. Similarly, Kumārila shows that the idea of a Lord who is at the same time all-mighty and benevolent is self-contradictory, since if the Lord where really all-might, he would avoid evil, and if he tolerates it, then he is cruel. If one says that evil is due to karman or other causes, Kumārila continues, then this shows that there is no need to add the Lord at all as a further cause and that everything can be explained just on the basis of karman or any other cause.

Are Kumārila’s criticisms also targeted at the idea of an impersonal and non-dual brahman? Kumārila does not explicitly address the issue of the possible distinction between one and the other target. However, a few scant hints may help readers. In a fragment from his lost Bṛhaṭṭīkā preserved in the work of a Buddhist opponent (the Tattvasaṅgraha), Kumārila speaks of deities as being vedadeha, i.e., ‘embodied in the Veda’ (so Yoshimizu 2008, fn. 78). In a verse of the TV, he says that they are ṛgvedādisamūheṣu […] pratiṣṭhitāḥ, i.e., ‘who reside in the Ṛgveda and all other [Vedic scriptures]’ (Yoshimizu 2007b, p. 221). Does this mean that Kumārila was accepting a conception of deities inhabiting the Vedas? I discussed the idea with a colleague who just said that the verses must be interpolated.

What do readers think? Was there local atheism in ancient India?

See also Yoshimizu’s comment to my post on Bhavanātha.

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Bhavanātha and the move towards theistic Mīmāṃsā

The Mīmāṃsā school of Indian philosophy started as an atheist school since its first extant text, Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā Sūtra. At a certain point in its history, however, it reinterpreted its atheist arguments as aiming only at a certain conception of god(s). In other words, it reinterpreted its atheism as being not a global atheism, but a form of local atheism, denying a certain specific form of god(s) and not any form whatsoever.

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Teaching ethics to a machine? You need some casuistic reasoning

Marcus Arvan convincingly argues in this article that while programming AI you can produce psychopathic behaviours both if you decide not to teach any moral target AND if you decide to teach moral targets.
Instead, you need to teach your machine some flexibility. Thus, I would argue, moral reasoning used for machines needs to be adjusted through a large set of cases and through rules dealing with specific cases. Can the Mīmāṃsā case-based application of rules help in such cases?

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Siddha and sādhya in Viśiṣṭādvaitavedānta

Has anyone read the Bhagavadguṇadarpaṇa?

At the beginning of his Seśvaramīmāṃsā, Veṅkaṭanātha tries to synthetise what he (and Rāmānuja) calls Pūrva and Uttara Mīmāṃsā, with the further addition of the Devatā Mīmāṃsā.
In this connection he needs to address an apparent divergence, namely that between the siddha and sādhya interpretation of the Veda. In other words: Does the Veda always convey something to be done? Or does it always convey something established? The unity of the three Mīmāṃsās and of the Veda as their basis does not allow for a different interpretation of the statements in the Upaniṣads and in the Brāhmaṇas.

Veṅkaṭanātha cites Rāmānuja in order to show that there is no real opposition and that the sādhya-aspect is parasitical upon a siddha one. The example he reuses from Rāmānuja is that of taking action in regard to a hidden treasure: One starts acting only after having known that the treasure is really there. Thus, the sādhya element (taking action) depends on the siddha one (the acquired cognition of something existing).

At this point he also quotes from anoter Vaiṣṇava author, namely Parāśara Bhaṭṭa. His Bhagavadguṇadarpaṇa is a commmentary on the Viṣṇusahasranāma and here comes the quote:

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Alternative theisms and atheisms (part 1)

One of the main advantages of dealing with worldviews other than the one you grew up in is the fact that you are exposed to doubts and alternatives. One of such cases regards the nebulous category of religion (to which Amod dedicated some illuminating posts on this blog), which in Europe and America is often confused with just “belief in (a) god(s)”. Part of the definition of religion is its being other than philosophy, so much that philosophy is looked upon with suspicion when it is mixed with “religious” purposes, like in the case of soteriology.

However, as soon as one encounters Buddhism, one is faced with the alternative: Either Buddhism is a religion (in which case, one would need to update one’s definition of religion) or it is a philososophy (in which case, one would need to update one’s definition of philosophy).

A similar case regards categories such as “Atheism”. Atheism as it is common nowadays is a relatively recent phenomenon in the Euro-American world, so much that one risks to postulate that it is a result of the Enlightenment, of Positivism, of the success of Science etc. A glance at South Asia shows that this is not the only way atheism can find its place in the history of philosophy. As shown by Larry McCrea, atheism might have been the rule rather than the exception in South Asian philosophy until the end of the first millennium. This also means that the later shift towards theism has a completely different flavour, insofar as it comes out of a different background.

I am especially intrigued by the moment in which this turn took place, with thinkers composing theistic texts and/or reinterpreting their texts and traditions in a theistic way. A typical example is the adoption and adaptation of Mīmāṃsā (originally an atheist philosophy) within theist Vedānta in the first centuries of the second millennium CE. I have already discussed about the various steps of this incorporation by Rāmānuja and Veṅkaṭanātha. What remains fascinating is

  1. how Mīmāṃsā was rebuilt through this encounter, with its atheism reconfigurated as negation of a given form of theos, but not of any form whatsoever.
  2. how Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta was challenged to produce a sustainable version of theism.

To elaborate: Theism in South Asia needed to grow in an environment in which atheist objections where the norm. It had, therefore, to inoculate itself with possible answers to these objections and to rethink an idea of the divine which could resist these attacks.

How could this phenomenon be studied? As usual with South Asian philosophy, many of the fundamental texts have never been edited and remain in manuscript form. Of the ones which have been edited, only a tiny minority has been translated. Of these translations, only a minority can be understood on its own right and independently of the Sanskrit (or Maṇipravāḷa) original. Still less common are works elaborating on the theology entailed in these texts (among the exceptions let me name Carman, Clooney, Mumme and Oberhammer; Ram-Prasad’s Divine Self especially focuses on Rāmānuja’s different concept of God). In short, texts need to be edited, translated, studied, compared with each other and read keeping in sight the goal of understanding the phenomenon of the convergence of theism and atheism.

Why at all should it be studied? The Mīmāṃsā author Kumārila Bhaṭṭa writes that without a purpose, even a foolish does not act, and in fact Sanskrit authors regularly announce at the beginning of their treatises the proximate and remote purpose of their works. In the present case, the proximate cause is the desire to understand the interactions between atheism and theism by looking at them from an unexpected perspective and to throw light on a fundamental chapter in the history of South Asian philosophy.

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Reading and comparing theories on sentence-meaning (part 1)

The Mīmāṃsaka Śālikanātha is Prabhākara’s main interpreter, yet he is also an original thinker. How much of Śālikanātha’s anvitābhidhāna theory for sentence signification is already there in Prabhākara’s Bṛhatī? We will find out reading the Bṛhatī and comparing it with Śālikanātha’s commentary thereon and with Śālikanātha’s elaboration of the topic in his independent treatise, the Vākyārthamātṛkā, during this workshop.

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What happens when the Veda prescribes malefic actions?

Vīrarāghavācārya's take on the Śyena

To my knowledge, Veṅkaṭanātha’s Seśvaramīmāṃsā (henceforth SM) has been commented upon only once in Sanskrit, namely in the 20th c. by Abhinava Deśika Vīrarāghavācārya.
Vīrarāghavācārya continues Veṅkaṭanātha’s agenda in reinterpreting Mīmāṃsā tenets in a Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta way.

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Why should one study the meaning of the Veda? I.e., why studying Mīmāṃsā?

(It is hard to present your research program to the public)

At a certain point in the history of Mīmāṃsā (and, consequently, of Vedānta), the discussion of the reasons for undertaking the study of Mīmāṃsā becomes a primary topic of investigation. When did this exactly happen? The space dedicated to the topic increases gradually in the centuries, but Jaimini and Śabara don’t seem to be directly interested in it.